karetApr 23, 2025

Faster alternative to Evince for PDFs

https://sh.itjust.works/post/36613418

Faster alternative to Evince for PDFs - sh.itjust.works

I’ve been using evince to open PDFs. But for larger PDFs it is quite laggy, for selecting the text and stuff like that. Is this just a limitation of my computer, or are there faster alternatives to evince?

Show threadFOSS Unleashed
@karet I've found zathura+mupdf is very quick and snappy. Poppler (the PDF library most things use, and Zathura can use it too) is ungodly slow. page (from plan9port) is also quite fast (it uses its own PDF code) but I'm not sure what level of compatibility it has.
Apr 23, 2025 at 10:53amWeb
Show threadkaretApr 23, 2025
Thanks a lot! Just installed it, and it is significantly faster. But it appears there’s no support for highlighting text. Is there like a plugin or something like that I can install?
Show threadFOSS UnleashedApr 23, 2025
@karet Zathura is meant to be very minimal, I don't even know if it has plugins (other than for loading other file formats, like epub). If you're wanting something more GUIey, Firefox (and thus Librewolf) has PDF.js support by default, and I've found that to be performant as well.